Suppose one of the activities you regularly perform is teaching. So you think of yourself as a "teacher." You identify some of what you do with your identity (self). This is the confusion of "be" and "do" discussed earlier under Money Skill #5. If you then "lose your job," you're likely to suffer an "identity crisis" -- at least, a big blow to your self-esteem.
In Chapter Four of his superb book The Survivor Personality, Al Siebert has the following section on what I call "label-think" and which I take the liberty to quote in full:
"THINKING OF PEOPLE AS NOUNS OR LABELS IMPAIRS THINKING
To understand the highly flexible nature of life's best survivors, it is important to examine another barrier to understanding. The first barrier is the tendency to think in either/or terms rather than both/and about personality qualities. The second barrier is to use nouns or labels when describing people. We live in a world where it has been common to call people "pessimists," "optimists," "liberals," "extroverts," "alcoholics," "schizophrenics," and "co-dependents." Turning people into such nouns, however, is a child's way of thinking. It limits understanding. It strips away what is unique about an individual and restricts the mind of the beholder to inaccurate generalizations.A more effective way to view people, and one that allows better understanding, is to assume that every person is more complex, unpredictable, and unique than any label. To assume a person is more complex than any theory opens up the possibility that a person can be both one way and the opposite.
An advantage of describing what people feel, think, and do instead of labeling them with a noun, is that when a person changes from one situation to the next, we can be comfortable with his or her shift instead of getting upset when they don't stay consistent with the way we have them categorized."
I recently received an email from someone who should remain anonymous:
> I read your Liberty Money Machines
> and I don't see haw it helps me to
> build a webpage... fellow SG victim.
Someone else sent me an email in which he called himself "SG survivor."
"SG" refers to Stockgeneration.
These self-applied labels indicate that the writers identified themselves with SG and that SG became part of their identities. So when their SG accounts were stripped to zero or nearly so, it was probably a major blow to their sense of self. It's unlikely that you can make rational financial decisions when you identify yourself with a stock, financial instrument, or money-making program. Such identification is likely to also prevent you from diversifying properly -- see Money Skill #25.
(When my personal SG account was stripped from over $300,000 (in "cyber-profits") to zero, it was only a minor disappointment because I didn't identify with SG and had already been involved in numerous other successful programs for several months.)
Identification can be subtle, for example:
> By the way, there are some new /excellent games coming on stream
> that DO offer us great odds again, so let's play those, and get going
> on learning their strategies. It's possible to win back all that was lost in
> SG by the end of the year!
Whatever anyone has lost in SG (or any other program) is gone forever. Whatever money anyone makes in any other program has nothing to do with past SG losses. To regard new winnings as "to win back all that was lost in SG" is a form of irrational identification. It's a thinking pattern that is likely to cause irrational decisions. For example, in another program you might be in a position where, considering only the program itself, your correct action is to sell. But the position might also be that, if you sell now, you'll "recover only half of what you lost in SG." So you irrationally try to wait until you can "recover everything you lost in SG."
